Lyndon Hood - Go-Passer, Lower Hutt

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Of course, some of the other rehabilitation programmes actually have bloody good results. Check out the sex offenders programme Kia Marama, for example - its relative effect on the relapse rate is in the same league as Herceptin (more cheerleading here).

In fact, the biggest problem with the intensive, in-prison rehabilitation programmes is that there aren't enough of them. Much like employment or vocational programmes. Or re-integration ones.

You can't say rehabilitation is a failed experiment if it hasn't been tried.

Even professional corrections-apocalypse-trumpeter Simon Power - despite the tendency of his rhetoric and his attempt to link it with an exaggerated version of a release plan Damien O'Connor says he doesn't have - is careful to consistently refer to some programmes (about two, isn't it?) being the Spawn of Satan.

So Tariana Turia can, in this instance, sod off. Not that she doesn't have a point about re-integration, but "a peculiar feature of our prison system is the dominance of psychologists in treatment programmes"? Who does she expect to do the psychological treatment? Boilermakers? Maori Party Co-Leaders?

Perhaps, at any rate, someone who knows what they're talking about. Not only does Turia clearly not understand the jargon she's making fun of, but the things she's complaining about are the ones run by the psychological amateurs.

If a problem that has (apparently) already been recognised and is (apparently) being fixed becomes an excuse to abandon stuff that actually works, well, I guess we'll just have to hope that lifetime criminals locked up with lifetime criminals somehow spontaneous develop not just the will but the empathy and skills needed to go straight.

Or, as the only other thing we could do for the reoffending rate, keep the minor criminals the hell away from prison.

On the other hand, if you want to mock justice system bureaucrats, you can try this...

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Lyndon Hood is the person whose blog this is, though he only takes some of the responsibility. Don't read his profile, it's even less up-to-date than the blogroll. Come to think of it, his homepage hasn't been updated in a while either.email Lyndon